Synthetic spine models and other anatomical models are critical to surgical education, patient education, the development and testing of new surgical treatment strategies, the development and testing of new devices for use in the treatment of spinal disorders, and as a research platform in spine biomechanical studies. Cadaveric spines are currently used as a standard educational and research platform for most of the above purposes. Cadaveric spines come with many limitations, however, that make their utility in surgical education, biomechanical research, and/or with new device testing platform highly limited.
Disadvantages of cadaveric spine models include their expense, difficulty in acquisition (via donors at the time of death), human tissue handling restraints and institutional requirements for cadaveric testing, risk to laboratory personnel when handling human tissue, inability (or very high difficulty) in obtaining models of specific pathologies, and high variability in biomechanical performance between specimens (thought to be due to variations in preservation technique, age of cadaveric specimen, and bone and soft tissue quality of donor at the time of death) which results in wider result variability during biomechanical testing. This wider result variability must be overcome by using larger numbers of cadavers during testing, further increasing the cost, tissue handling requirements, and subsequent risks.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding elements among the view of the drawings. The headings used in the figures do not limit the scope of the claims.